If you have problems with the network installation, or have several local machines to install or keep up to date, you may find it helpful to separate the operations of downloading TeX Live and the actual installation or update. Thus, “mirroring the TeX Live repository”. This “repository” contains each TeX Live package in (one, two, or three) separate .tar.xz files. This repository is what is used by the regular network installer and by tlmgr for updates.
By far the most efficient method of mirroring is rsync:
rsync -a --delete rsync://somectan/somepath/systems/texlive/tlnet/ /your/local/dir
Here, somectan is a CTAN
mirror that offers rsync and is nearby to you. The
/somepath is the top-level CTAN directory on that mirror. If
you want to see all the files that get transferred, add -v. If
you want a statistics report at the end, add --progress. (See
the rsync
documentation.)
If rsync is problematic for whatever reason, you can use wget (or
other tools) to mirror via http or ftp. Here is a sample wget
invocation:
wget --mirror --no-parent ftp://somectan/somepath/systems/texlive/tlnet/ /your/local/dir
with the same somectan and somepath as above.
(The --background, --no-host-directories, and/or
--cut-dirs options may be useful. See the wget documentation.)
After successfully mirroring, you can run the regular TL installer, either one of the install-tl* scripts in your new local repository directory, or unpack install-tl.{tar.gz,zip}, etc. See the installation instructions or read the documentation, which has an item about the -in-place installation option.
However, if you are on Windows, to run install-tl-windows directly you must ensure that all the *.bat, *.dll, and *.manifest files are executable. Either the mirroring software or the original mirror often clears executable permissions. Using install-tl.zip may be simpler.
Sources: the mirroring as above will not include the hundreds of megabytes of sources for the compiled programs. The sources for the current release are on CTAN, and historical releases are also available, and of course current development sources are in the repository.
Information about installing TeX Live directly over the Internet is available separately, as well as other ways to acquire TeX Live.